SUBMERGE

Costa da Morte / Galicia (Spain)

Anna Franke is drawn to the memory and movement of the sea — to make its traces visible, more visceral, corporeal even.

This instinct is what makes her involve her body with the fabric, moving slowly, touching water, where connection and creation occur simultaneously.

Reflecting on the human and non-human traces in the landscape, analysing the relationships between nature and culture, she questions – what is natural force, and what is cultural trace?

Her process reveals itself through the rituals of bathing herself and the fabric, exploring the movement of water and the aesthetics of transformation. *She documents the movement of fabric through light and reflection in the water — creating sculptures in motion*. The amorphous forms that emerge seem like evidence from a time long gone — like creatures of the sea, with deep furrows and branches resembling labyrinths.

After many layers of transformation through salt crystals, gold leaf, marble dust, charcoal, oyster shell fragments, and wax, these forms acquire their character of aging, faded, with traces of scratching, friction, and erosion. Where the water has moved, it leaves behind furrows that are at once routes, scars, hiding places, and imprints of memory. The sculptures exist in a state of flux, caught between fragments of light, pain, and faded glory — as if remnants of a primordial body thrown into space.

As she deepens this process, her early research is finding resonance in Galician mythology and symbolism, research that is rooted in the rhythms of Costa da Morte, submerged in the movement of its waters.